It all started with potatoes. City Harvest, a New York City-based non-profit that works to combat food insecurity in the city, received 30 gallons of cooked potatoes as their first donation in 1982. Since then, the organization has prevented 500 million pounds of food—all of it donations from restaurants—from going to a landfill.

Last week, City Harvest and food writer Florence Fabricant released a cookbook collecting recipes from some of NYC’s best restaurants, all of which donate a portion of their product to City Harvest. And in keeping with the organization's mission, the book is full of tips on how to combat food waste at home. To a group of cooks and writers obsessed with cooking #wasteless, that was music to the ears. Here are some of our favorites.

Keep Your Mushrooms Fresher, Longer

A recipe for a warm mushroom salad from luxurious TriBeCa restaurant Bouley calls for armfuls of mushrooms. What do you do with leftovers? Put the uncooked mushrooms in "a paper bag left open at the top in the refrigerator—not sealed in a plastic bag—which causes them to soften and rot.”

Soup Up Your French Toast

NYC stalwart Union Square Café gives a recipe for creamy corn soup, and there's almost endless possibilities for repurposing it. “A corn puree—before you thin it with cream to make the soup—can be used in many ways. Use it as a pasta sauce with black pepper and pecorino, as an addition to pancake batter, or for coating French toast.”

Turn Soup Into Sauce

Chef Daniel Boulud provides a recipe for a seasonal (and warmly spiced) butternut and delicata squash soup from DBGB, his beer hall-cum-rock club. Pooled on plates, the leftovers make a nice complement for roast pork or game.

Fry That Cold Mac and Cheese

Murray's, the West Village cheese shop, reveals their mean mac-and-cheese recipe in these pages. If you actually have any left the next day, the recipe recommends you cut the cold mac and cheese into slices and sauté them.

Breakfast on Risotto Pancakes

Bâtard's Austrian-inspired cuisine earned it the 2015 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant, and the recipe for pea-and-watercress risotto will tell you why. Should you have any leftover in the morning, the restaurant suggests you chill the leftovers, then shape them into little pancakes for frying. Serve it with or eggs.

Top Everything With Tapenade

Is there anything a pistachio tapenade (paired with lamb in these pages) can't go on? Food Network chef Anne Burrell doesn't think so. “Pour a film of olive oil to seal the top, then refrigerate any extra tapenade to use in other recipes. Try it as a garnish for soup, like the cauliflower. Toss with pasta, add to vinaigrette, or simply spread it on toast.”

That's So Cold

My favorite "leftover" trick was included in Brooklyn-based Franny's recipe for fusilli with sausage, cannellini beans, and chilis. ”Don’t you love cold pasta straight from the fridge as a late-night snack?" Touché, Franny's.